Scholarly societies must revisit their mission statements to continue to support their membership

Since 2010, scholarly societies have established themselves as important institutional forces that can advocate for and work to enact cultural change and improve equity and inclusion in their fields. However, since the 2024 election, the political environment in the USA has had a dramatic chilling effect on overt efforts to support equity and inclusion. If the past 15 years of emphasis on equity and inclusion has genuinely resulted in cultural change, we have reason to be optimistic, because these values should be reflected in the broader missions of our societies and thus be sustainable. To assess the extent to which this might be true, we systematically examined mission and purpose statements across 194 scholarly societies that are affiliates or members of the American Association for the Advancement of Sciences (AAAS) or the American Institute of Biological Sciences (AIBS). Unfortunately, we found that only 25% of these societies have incorporated inclusive or equity-oriented goals into their formal mission statements and governing documents. In contrast, 85% of these societies have made publicly-accessible commitments to support values-based or cultural change towards inclusive practices in their communities. Unfortunately, these short-comings are in-line with prior criticism raised by us and others of many of the diversity- and equity-branded efforts championed by our institutions. Inserting or advertising terms like “diversity” and “equity” is insufficient to promote true cultural change; these word choices remain performative unless they are backed by structural reorganization and mission emphases. Here, we advocate for scholarly societies to formally encode their cultural values in their mission statements, both to provide a legal framework to support this work and to affirm their communities when hard-fought cultural shifts are being rapidly retracted elsewhere.